Welcome to The Week in Generative AI, a weekly column for marketers from Quad Insights that quickly sums up need-to-know developments surrounding this rapidly evolving technology.
AI everywhere at CES 2024
Kicking off the new year in Las Vegas, CES 2024, the tech industry’s annual trade show, is expected to deliver a steady stream of AI-related news. “AI will likely be so ubiquitous at CES 2024 that it’ll be strange if a company doesn’t mention the technology,” writes Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley, referencing, for instance, how Samsung will be displaying AI-powered refrigerators.
It’s expected that the introduction of the “AI PC” from major chip makers (AMD, Intel and Qualcomm) will dominate the chatter on the trade show floor, but as Howley notes, “companies are still trying to figure out how AI PCs will benefit most people.”
“Even the artwork used to promote CES 2024 was created with generative AI,” Patrick Seitz reports in Investor’s Business Daily.
One AI luminary not expected to attend: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, per Max A. Cherney and Abhirup Roy at Reuters.
Related Coverage:
- “CES 2024—From AI to Walmart and the Las Vegas Sphere, Everything Marketers need to know” (Ad Age)
- “CES 2024: How to watch as Nvidia, Samsung and more reveal hardware, AI updates” (TechCrunch)
- “Get Ready for a ‘Tsunami’ of AI at CES” (Wired)
Microsoft’s Copilot AI is a keystroke away
AI is coming to a keyboard near you, the AP’s Matt O’Brien reports, noting that Microsoft’s addition of a Copilot key that launches its AI chatbot “will be Microsoft’s biggest change to PC keyboards since it introduced a special Windows key in the 1990s.”
“By year’s end, the Copilot key should be ubiquitous on new PCs,” according to Ina Fried at Axios.
Related coverage:
- “Introducing a new Copilot key to kick off the year of AI-powered Windows PCs” (Windows Experience Blog)
- “Microsoft’s Copilot AI app expands to iPhone, iPad – here’s what you can do with it” (ZDNET)
- “Microsoft’s new AI key is first big change to keyboards in decades” (Associated Press)
The New York Times sues OpenAI
ICYMI: On Dec. 27, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, marking an escalation in the ongoing debate over AI’s use of copyrighted materials. As The Verge’s Emma Roth reports, the lawsuit “alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.”
Roth notes that The Times “claims it has attempted to negotiate with both companies for months to ‘ensure it received fair value for the use of its content,’ but failed to reach a solution.” (Meanwhile, the Times is exploring ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into its own journalistic practices, as we discussed on Dec. 15 after the publication hired an editorial director for AI initiatives.)
Reuters’ Jonathan Stempel reports that “The Times is not seeking a specific amount of damages but estimated damages in the billions of dollars. It also wants OpenAI and Microsoft to destroy chatbot models and training sets that incorporate its material.”
Over at Fast Company, Mark Sullivan observes that the lawsuit “marked a sobering coda to 2023” for the AI industry in part because more such copyright-related cases “could slow everything down, as legal exposure concerns become a bigger factor in AI companies’ plans.”
Related coverage:
- “An Artist in Residence on A.I.’s Territory” (The New York Times)
- “New York Times sues Microsoft, ChatGPT maker OpenAI over copyright infringement” (CNBC)
- “OpenAI Offers Publishers as Little as $1 Million a Year” (The Information)
- “The New York Times wants OpenAI and Microsoft to pay for training data” (TechCrunch)
Further reading
- “Can Midjourney’s CEO Stop a Storm of Fake Election Images?” (Bloomberg)
- “Google appears to be working on an ‘advanced’ version of Bard that you have to pay for” (The Verge)
- “Generative AI’s wild 2023” (Reuters)
- “Happy Puppies and Silly Geese: Pushing the Limits of A.I. Absurdity” (The New York Times)
- “Here’s how three people in the ad industry are using AI” (Marketing Brew)
- “How Did Companies Use Generative AI in 2023? Here’s a Look at Five Early Adopters.” (The Wall Street Journal)
- “How to Use OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Create Your Own Custom GPT” (Wired)
- “Jeff Bezos Bets on a Google Challenger Using AI to Try to Upend Internet Search” (The Wall Street Journal)
- “OpenAI’s app store for GPTs will launch next week” (TechCrunch)
- “Welcome to the era of AI nationalism” (The Economist)
Thank you for reading as we start a new year, with plenty of AI news to come.
If you’d like to catch up on prior installments of this column, start by heading to our final edition of 2023: “The Week in Generative AI: December 22, 2023
